UK to build World’s most powerful climate-change forecasting supercomputer

Met Office and Microsoft are to build a weather forecasting supercomputer in the UK. The UK Government is to invest 1.2 billion Pound Sterling in the project.

About the Supercomputer

  • The supercomputer is expected to be one of the top twenty-five supercomputers in the world.
  • It will help in better understanding of Climate Change.
  • The supercomputer will provide the following:
    • It will provide detailed weather models
    • It will help to improve localised forecasts
    • It will run more potential weather scenarios
    • It will help predict severe weather
  • The Supercomputer is to run completely on renewable energy. This will help to save 7,415 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide in one year. Supercomputers release huge amounts of heat and thus a strong cooling system is required for their operation. Thus, energy required to maintain supercomputers is high.
  • It will have more than 1.5 million processor cores
  • The supercomputer will be able to do 60 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 60,000,000,000,000,000.

Benefits

  • The Supercomputer will be used to create detailed city scale simulations to provide localised climate reports.
  • It will help the aviation industry with an accurate forecast of temperature and wind information. This in turn will help to improve the fuel efficiency.
  • It will help UK to achieve its net Zero target by 2050.

About Supercomputers

  • Since 2017 the top 500 supercomputers of the world are running on Linux-based Operating System.
  • The performance of supercomputers is now measured in Floating Point operations per second called FLOPS. Earlier they were measured in Million Instructions per Second.
  • Lenovo became the largest provider of Top 500 supercomputers. It has provided 117 units of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

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